“Good news people! I’m happy to announce that another union has joined us in a sympathy strike, the Piano Tuners Local Four-Twelve!” – Mrs. Krabappel

It won’t matter, and I probably shouldn’t tamper with forces I don’t understand, but my boycott of Entertainment Weekly’s stupid “best character” list continues. It combines things I truly hate: arguing over specific placements on pop culture lists, mindless Zombie Simpsons rah-rah (“twenty years and going strong!”), and Entertainment Weekly. (I do not consider it a coincidence that their website’s URL is best pronounced “eww”.) However, their pageview ploy worked so well that I did find two links that are worth a look. Helpfully, both of them go to other blogs, so I don’t feel too dirty. We’ve also got two YouTube versions of the “Talkin’ Softball” song, a Simpsons/Rule 34 image that’s funny and non-pornographic, some excellent usage, and a couple of different people ragging on Zombie Simpsons.

Enjoy.

…Woo Hoo! – Getting the best character stuff out of the way early, here’s a defense of Homer that gets linked because it comes with YouTube from “Marge on the Lam”.

Homer And Bart Simpson Electronic Dart Board Game – Krusty Brand Seal of Approval on this one. Homer and Bart’s faces cover much of the board, and it doesn’t even look like it has numbers on it. You want to stick Homer and Bart on a dart board? Fine. But at least make it playable. (via)

Old school – This is just a screen grab of Bart reading about Whacking Day, the quote is slightly off:

“Don’t bother the snakes.

Leave the snakes alone.”

Barry White’s actual lyric is “Leave all the snakes alone.” That nit picked, the blog it came from, “Inverted Soapbox”, gets an overall gold star for excellent usage. It not only uses Mr. Burns to help explain the hidden pitfalls of vegetarianism, but the about page is titled “Guh?” and includes this:

Lisa Simpson, saxophone player – This is just a nicely written piece about Lisa, including some glancing but sincere Zombie Simpsons hate. Then there’s this:

So you’ll excuse me if I get snotty and say that Lisa has no business lip-syncing Ke$ha’s butt-stupid “Tik Tok.”

You do not need to be excused at all. You are 100% correct, snottiness is completely justified.

When One-Trick Ponies Attack – Does it still count as excellent usage when you get the quotes right but snip out a couple of lines in the middle? Nah. You can’t drop, “Wait, don’t be fooled! She’s just a regular Malibu Stacy with a stupid cheap hat!” without going down to moderate usage.

Even a good movie spin-off doesn’t do a lot to help a show’s cultural currency, and may actually hurt it: the Simpsons movie was a hit, but it re-enforced the idea that the show was more of an institution re-visiting its past glories — since the movie was just a larger-budget version of everything we’d seen before.

Useful Legal Tidbit

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